- From: Charles McCathieNevile <chaals@opera.com>
- Date: Thu, 03 Jan 2008 01:13:55 +0100
- To: "gareth edison" <gareth.edison@googlemail.com>, w3c-translators@w3.org
On Tue, 01 Jan 2008 15:19:00 +0100, gareth edison <gareth.edison@googlemail.com> wrote: > I would just like to reply on some of the remarks made by Charles > >> > I fail to grasp the importancy of translating documents into languages >> > like Turmen, Uzbek, Azerbajan, Kazakh, Belarussian, Ukrainian, > >> Estonian, Latvian, Tatar, Georgian or even Armenian. >> >> Well, if you happen to speak such a language, which quite a lot of >> people >> do, then it is helpful to find documents in that language.* > In this case I m sure it will not bother you if I propose to translate > some of the documents into the following Irish dialects: Caighdeán > Oifigiúil, Gaeilge Bhleá Cliath and Caighdeán Oifigiúil as well as > Welsh Cymraeg ( I am Welsh ) and maybe when Im finnished I may > dabble in the Scottish Gàidhlig No, it doesn't bother me in the least. Since Irish has status as an official language of a real country, and since both it and Cymraeg are taught in schools, it would be great to have more resources available in those languages. I am sorry that Opera does not have a current translation into them (lack of resources, and no known volunteers)... > This brings me once again to the whole point of my first post, and I > repeat: > > Who is going to proof read all these translations in able to uphold the > high standards required for an online translation of a W3C document ? > Who is going to proof read Turmen, Uzbek, Azerbajan, Kazakh, Tatar and > the likes ? And my response was in two parts. The first point is that there is no "high standard required" - even the original documents are sometimes badly written (I say that as a someone who has been personally responsible for the exact wording of text in some sections of W3C recommendations that have managed to cause confusion running for *years*). The more people who look at a document the better. The second point was, as Ivan also suggested, that people who are interested in the documents can do this - and from time to time already do. > *> Wouldnt it be much wiser to allow ONLY *native speakers* to translate >> > documents for W3C instead of people producing translations >> > which they cant read themselves? >> >> Not really, in my opinion. [...] > > > Firstly it seems that W3C made similar proposals and I quote: > > "I think we should inquire of translators whether they are native > speakers, and even prefer them to be in-country, and only go with > people who aren't when there are unusual circumstances." This is a suggestion from an individual, who is not the person responsible for Translations. It is an interesting suggestion, but I think it is wrong, which is why I said so. > On this note it wont harm if I ask my next door neighbour to translate a > W3C document into Kalaallisut. He is a fisherman but I am sure he will > make his way thought he translation ;-) If he is indeed willing to volunteer his time to do so then I doubt it does any harm and may even help some other people, although if he has to learn the language first it is likely to take some time. But even fishermen have to have some kind of pastime, and learning languages is more or less never a bad thing. (Or does he happen to speak Kalaallisut already?) Seriously, I am a native english speaker, although I am based between two countries where english is not an official language. I have written articles, documents, and so on in both french and spanish (as the original language of composition), and some of these, and translations by me, are on the W3C website. I am not the greatest translator, but I am not terrible either, and if I happen to have the time then I can make a translation that is useful enough for people to either read or criticise and help improve. For a spanish speaker who reads english fluently, my translations are not that good. But for spanish speakers who do not, I have seven years of experience explaining W3C specifications (for the first half in pretty poor-quality spanish) and a track record of seeing the explanations lead to a better understanding than they had achieved through their efforts at trying to understand the original. This applies also (again, in my personal practical experience over the last seven years) to French and Italian, although I have spent less time working in those two languages on W3C-related stuff. In all three example languages there are large active communities where it is easy enough to see how this works by participating for a while. But there is also a community that was set up at my instigation who is working in finnish and its dialects on accessibility. Finnish is, in global terms, a tiny language spoken mostly by people who are also considered universally functionally literate in english. And yet initial reports (this was seven and a half years ago, and I haven't followed up) were that this turned out to be more useful than the people involved in it had expected. The example you give is a little facetious, but one of the ways that a group of people can better understand a document is by translating it and working with the translations as well as the original. As chair of a W3C workng group, against W3C preferred policy, I actively seek translations of working drafts (and in some cases participate in producing them) because it helps get feedback from a community who could not otherwise participate meaningfully in the development of the specification, and because it helps find parts of the draft that are not as clear as we would like. Generally the translations of drafts are somewhat slap-dash (as are the some of the drafts themselves) but my experience is that even when these translations are done in a rush by someone only moderately competent working over a machine translation it still proves useful to pretty much all concerned. [...] > I dont have a degree in linguistics nor do I speak Welsh. Nor do I. I do have a reasonably large amount of experience working with multilingual and with non-english-speaking communities, and some with non-english-speaking communities based in english-speaking countries. For example, although I speak none of the north-eastern Arnhem Land Yolngu-matha group of languages, and many of the 10,000 speakers of them (there are about 30 languages in the group, and most speakers can speak about half-a-dozen if they speak any) speak little english, > It was also never my intent > to offend anyone at anytime. So I apologize if I did offend anyone. It doesn't seem that anyone took offence, which is a good sign that this list does indeed cherish the freedom to speak up. You should be aware that language is a touchy subject for many people (a little like religion), so it would probably pay to check basic statements carefully. I also don't intend to offend you (or anyone else) and hope that my comments are taken as an attempt at positive contribution in good faith... cheers Chaals -- Charles McCathieNevile Opera Software, Standards Group je parle français -- hablo español -- jeg lærer norsk http://my.opera.com/chaals Try Opera 9.5: http://snapshot.opera.com
Received on Thursday, 3 January 2008 00:13:42 UTC